The Charm of Gardens

by Dion Clayton Calthrop

To me a winding path offers the more alluring prospect, just as it is more pleasant to walk on a winding road where each turn opens out a fresh vista, and the coming of every hidden corner is in the way of an adventure. I have just made such a path.

To be precise my path is eighteen feet long and two feet and a quarter wide. It curves twice, really in a sort of courteous bow in avoiding a Standard Rose tree, and begins and ends in a little low step of Box; this to prevent the cinders of which it is made from mingling with gravel of the paths into which it runs.

I began it on a Monday. It is made through a Rose bed that was too wide to work properly. At about nine in the morning the gardener and I stood regarding the unconscious Rose-bed with much the same gravity as men might regard a range of hills through which a tunnel was to be drilled.

I said, “This seems the best place to make a path through the bed.”

The gardener made a serpentine movement with his hand to indicate the possible curve of the path and replied, after an interval: that such a place seemed as good as any.

We then, with a certain lightening of heart after this tremendous thought, walked into the bed and surveyed it. This tree would have to be moved, and that one, and these half standards shifted. Good. It should be done.

It seems that the earth requires a little ceremonial even when the merest scratch is to be made on her surface. I am sure we wheeled a barrow containing spades, a line, and sticks with some feeling of processional pride. The gardener then, having come to a stop with the barrow, spat, very solemnly on his hands. It appeared to be the exact form of ritual required. In a few minutes we had pegged a way.

I suppose a spade is the first implement of peace ever made by human kind. It is certainly the pleasantest to hold. A rake is a more dandified affair, a hoe not so well-formed. The scythe and the sickle have a store of poetry and legend about them, but the rake and the hoe contain no romantic virtues. Although the plough is the recognised implement of peace in symbolical language, it joins hands with war in that same language—“turning their swords into ploughshares”—and so loses much of its peaceful meaning, but the spade remains always the sword of the man of peace, one weapon by which he conquers the ground and makes the earth yield her fruits. For me the spade.

The gardener, having spat upon his hands regarded the earth and sky as if to mark and measure the earth and the heavens, and them to witness his first cut. The spade, lifted for a moment, drove deep into the earth. The soil, pressed by the steel, turned. A new path was begun. How long is it to last?

There are garden paths, so commenced, have made history in their day, why not mine? Kings, Princes, Lords, Queens, Maids of Honour, spies and honourable men have trodden garden paths, measuring their small length and discussing everything in the states of Love or Country to come to some decision. The Poppies Tarquin slew gave their message. The Pinks that Michonis brought to Marie Antoinette grew by some garden path; that very bunch of Pinks in which lay a note promising her safety, brought her death more near. What comedies, what tragedies, vows made and broken, kisses stolen and repented, have not had for platform just such a path as mine.